The paleo or paleolithic diet is one of the most used options today to lose weight while protecting the health of the body. We show you the bases that you have to know to practice if you are a beginner.
Before knowing its main features and the bases to consider for a paleo diet, it is important to know that it is inspired by the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had very low levels of overweight and obesity due to a high expenditure of calories derived from their intense physical activity and they had a diet with moderate to low carbohydrate content and high-quality protein intake.
Your weekly diet with Vitónica: recommended paleo menu to lose weight
In Vitónica
Your weekly diet with Vitónica: recommended paleo menu to lose weight
With this in mind, if you are a beginner, this is what you should know about the paleo diet:
A look at …
The base is fresh and seasonal food.
Because the diet inspires it that our ancestors lead, the paleo diet does not allow the intake of processed and ultra-processed foods of any kind.
It is based on fresh and seasonal foods, affecting the quality of the diet and automatically discarding some healthy ingredients such as whole grains or legumes (even in their dry version).
Thus, you can consume all kinds of fruits and vegetables, fresh meats, fish, eggs, shellfish, and nuts or seeds.
It is essential to prioritize plant ingredients.
The latest scientific evidence points out the advantages of basing our usual diet on foods of plant origin. It is likely that our ancestors also did so since hunting an animal for consumption was much more difficult than accessing berries, fruits, seeds, etc., other collections.
Therefore, if we want to lose weight while taking care of our health, we recommend prioritizing consuming foods of plant origin such as fruits and various vegetables (including starch), nuts, seeds, extra virgin olive oil, herbs, and spices.
We will also obtain good quality hydrates from these foods with a high proportion of fiber, unsaturated fats, vegetable proteins, and various antioxidants.
Meats should always be fresh and lean
Meat
The meats they consumed in the Paleolithic era were game, that is, derived from wild animals, so their fat percentage was very low.
At present, if we want to approach this type of diet without putting the health of the body at risk, we must always choose fresh and lean meats.
A paleo ad libitum diet, with a predominance of meats of all kinds, could not be favorable by negatively modifying lipids in the blood, while if we choose lean meats and abundant vegetable ingredients, the benefits can be more tangible and the risks reduced.
When did you start talking about the paleo diet?
Even though what the paleo lifestyle proposes is millions of years old, it was not until the 1920s that this lifestyle began to be talked about.
In the decade of the 20s of the last century, the dentist Weston Price began to investigate the oral health of the current tribes that had remained on the margins of civilization and theorize about the negative impact of modern diet on modern diet health. Do not forget that the mouth is the first point of contact of food with the body.
Weston price book
The reason for the doctor’s study was to study the dental health of these tribes, who, unlike the people who lived in modern civilization, enjoyed much better oral health without cavities or occlusion problems.
Later in the 1970s, the gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin contributed to the spread of the Paleolithic diet and its benefits through his book The Stone Age Diet.
But it was not until 1985 that the anthropologists Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner, both from Emory University, published an article entitled “Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications” (see) on Human Diet in the Paleolithic in the New England Journal Of Medicine when this model of nutrition began to enjoy some recognition from the scientific community.
Later, Dr. Staffan Lindeberg, in his famous Kitava study published in 1994, went much deeper into the theory that we are not well adapted to our current environment, and this is the origin of many modern diseases or of “civilization” (obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, among others).
Different paleo diets (ancestral diets)
When talking about the evolutionary diet, there is a lot of confusion about what our ancestors ate. There is no single Paleolian diet Ethical. Depending on the geographical area where the tribe was settled, the foods they had at their disposal, such as different vegetables, tubers, fruits, or animals.
To give us an idea of the diversity of food and diets, the following graph shows the distribution of the main nutrients in the diet of 4 modern tribes of hunters and gatherers, which still maintain their ancestral culture, such as the Inuit, the Hiwi, the! Kung and the Hadza.
But what is not possible for discussion and we know for sure is what they did not eat, the ultra-processed industrial products that now flood our supermarkets and make us sick.
The origin of the term ultra-processed
The origin of the term “ultra-processed” to designate edible industrial products, made from highly refined and mostly synthetic ingredients, we owe to Carlos Monterio, researcher, and nutritionist at the University of Sao Paulo (see, see).
Following in the footsteps of Monteiro, there are more and more studies that link modern diseases with the current lifestyle, in which the consumption of ultra-processed foods plays a prominent role, along with sedentary lifestyle and stress.
Diseases caused by the consumption of ultra-processed products
As we said, more and more studies relate or associate the consumption of ultra-processed drugs with modern diseases (see, see, see, see). And the problem is not an excess of calories, as the industry would have us believe; the problem is the ultra-processing itself because it is unhealthy and harmful to health.
However, we do not intend to create an alarm and spread panic; we simply want to inform about the risks of consuming ultra-processed health products, as with tobacco.
There is a great similarity between the tobacco industry and the ultra-processed food industry to escape regulation. Since the health harms of tobacco were known in the 1950s, until the Spanish Anti-Smoking Law of 2006 was enacted, more than 50 years have passed. Will we have to expect the same in the case of ultra-processed?
